I have had the BDP-1 for a month now. The hardware side is fine (superior to USB/SPDIF computer streaming), but the user interface is rather poor making the BDP-1 a highly recommended product at this time rather dubious. I have a rather large music library of high resolution audio and redbook CD's. All music's stored with FLAC compression on 2 TB WD Caviar Black or Barracudda XT SATA NTSF formated hard disks (the drives hold idential information - redundancy is for back-up). The current library of music is 780 GB. I was hoping to use my iPad, but the Bryston MAX does not allow for scrolling of files on the iPad. So I use a MacBook Air running FireFox and have experimented with Minion, MPod, Theremin, and Bryston MAX. I like have album art show with the song or album being played, and in that respect the Bryston MAX is best. Those that link to outside avenues such as Amazon or Last FM fail to show album art about 25% of the time. The Bryston MAX client interface fails on the iPad, is horribly sluggish, constantly refreshing, and will occasionally freeze needing a reboot. There is no ability to search and scroll by artist or album. With large files, this is essential. Theremin has a clean interface and loads a file on the computer of the music library. It is quick and responsive and allows for a variety of search options. It fails is album artwork and refressing the database after adding new music files crashes the program (the work around is to delete the Thermin file of the music library - it will create a new one upon opening the program). Minion is good and similar to Theremin (but no artwork). MPoD is good, however the same problem with artwork. The upcoming MPaD version may be very good. My problem with the BDP-1 is implementation of the user interface. This is so critical for this type of product. Users are left with undesirable lesser of the evil options. This makes music listening a rather arduous rather than enjoyable experience. The Bryston MAX client needs to be more like the Theremin library and load a copy of the library onto the computer for speed. One should be able to edit playlists (delete a song). I find with the MAX it is very easy to inadvertently duplicate a song and when this happens deep into a playlist, one needs to start over. The album art feature of MAX is great and should stay. The interface needs to be searchable by song, artist, album, genre, year, or by album art. The occasional freezing of MAX is not acceptable. Also, one should have the ability to return to the spot of departure (lets say the M's instead of have to restart at the top of the music library list). Unless I am missing something, the BDP-1 is a tweaky piece of gear sue to poorly implemented interface. I really like to remote interfaces for MediaMonkey and SqeezeCenter - they made discovery of "lost" gems a pleasure and a time of rediscovery. The advantages of the BDP-1 over computer or server based streaming are enormous and its hardware performance is outstanding. The user interface leaves me cold and frustrated. I hope there are plans soon to have an interface than makes discovery of ones music collection enjoyable. The interface to the end user will trump all technology otherwise developed.
On a side note, the BDP-1 connects to my Classe SSP-800 via S/PDIF. The Classe SSP-800 has an info screen reporting data input. With high resolution files (up to 192 kHz), it often reports 48 kHz. This is not the case with high resolution feeds from my Classe CDT-300 via S/PDIF or the Oppo BDP-93 via HDMI. I called Bryston in regards to this, and was told to expect a return call with some insight on this. A week later - no call returned. any ideas out there on what might be occurring?